movie

Best geek movies throughout history.

Film review: The Lion King
With its mythic story of life and death, not to mention a cast of lions and hyenas, The Lion King was an unlikely candidate for a photo-realistic treatment. But the new film leaps into naturalism, with dazzling authenticity as computer-generated herds of zebras, elephants and antelope stride across the screen against a wide African vista, toward Pride Rock, where King Mufasa stands waiting to hold up his cub, Simba. With The Circle of Life soaring in the background, this majestic scene draws us into the film’s enthralling world before a word is spoken. It may all be CGI, but The Lion King feels more life-like than Disney’s many recent live-action remakes of its animated classics.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Is Fight Club’s Tyler Durden film's most misunderstood man?
When David Fincher’s movie of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club was released 20 years ago, it polarised the critics.
By Monu Ella3 years ago in Geeks
Why Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece
A young woman’s face appears on a movie screen, gigantic in close-up and starkly black and white, interrupting a Nazi propaganda movie. In a Paris theatre, where Hitler and other Nazi officials are attending the German film’s premiere, the haunting screen image of Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) tells them, “You are all going to die.” She has set a fire that will kill them, unaware that her plot overlaps with a US-and-British military operation to blow up the theatre. The entire exhilarating sequence – from the film within the film, to Shosanna’s fire, the soldiers’ bloody shootout, and the wish-fulfillment of Hitler’s death – unites the strands of Quentin Tarantino’s underrated masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, released 10 years ago this month.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
The Personal History of David Copperfield
Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield is so imaginatively conceived and so gloriously cast – with Dev Patel as Charles Dickens’s semi- autobiographical hero, and Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton in stunningly comic yet touching roles – that it banishes the very idea of a fusty 19th-Century period piece. Of course, anyone who has read Dickens as an adult, rather than forcibly in school, will realise that his books are hardly stuffy, but lively and comic.
By Monu Ella3 years ago in Geeks
Venice Film Festival review: The Truth
Hirokazu Kore-Eda has been writing and directing supremely humane, insightful dramas for 20 years, to greater and greater acclaim: last year’s Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar. Now, he’s made his first film outside of Japan, The Truth (or La Verité), which opens this year’s Venice Film Festival. Not much has been lost in translation. It’s certainly lighter and breezier than usual: more likely to make you laugh, but less likely to make you cry. In his Japanese work, the characters tend to be one wrong move away from destitution and/or death, whereas in his new laidback farce they don’t seem to risk anything worse than a hangover brought on by too much expensive brandy. But Kore-Eda’s understanding of the complexities of familial love and the disappointments of middle age is as wise as ever.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Two stars for Soderbergh’s disappointing The Laundromat
The award for this year’s best opening scene should go to The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded, non-fiction comedy about the Panama Papers. Shot in what appears to be one long, unbroken take, it’s a walk-and-talk lecture on the history of money delivered by Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, two notorious lawyers played with irresistible swagger by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas respectively. Oldman, especially, revels in his role as the self-righteous, preening Mossack, pushing his German accent to Herzog-ian extremes, and emphasising his hissing s-es like a villainous snake in a Disney cartoon.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Toronto International Film Festival review: The Goldfinch
“I don’t have to tell you about loss,” Nicole Kidman says softly to Ansel Elgort, whose character’s mother died years before, when a bomb exploded at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We are well into The Goldfinch by then, but Kidman’s controlled, elegiac manner captures the tone that dominates throughout. John Crowley’s adaptation of Donna Tartt’s novel is beautifully photographed and eloquently told, but too emotionally muted for its own good.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
TIFF review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
nyone even slightly aware of who Fred Rogers was – the soft-spoken, beloved host of Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, the children’s television program that taught values like kindness and forgiveness – can understand the response of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a hard-nosed reporter assigned to interview him. “The hokey kid show guy?” he asks, incredulous and insulted. His reaction is a perfect expression of the dread some of us brought to the idea of a film about Mr Rogers, a fear enhanced by what seemed the too-neat casting of Tom Hanks in the lead, one impossibly good guy playing another. But Marielle Heller’s wise, sophisticated A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood turns out to be something rare – a warm-hearted film that even cynics can love.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Can cinema still shock?
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, there was no bigger talking point than The Painted Bird. The new film by Czech director Václav Marhoul is a black-and-white adaptation of the 1965 novel by Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński, which describes World War Two from the perspective of a young Jewish boy on a journey through the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Its press and industry screening inspired walkouts on three separate occasions, ensuring the film a certain period of notoriety. This was followed up by further walkouts a week later during its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
By Monu Ella3 years ago in Geeks
For Sama and the female perspective on war
“Everything we know about war we know with ‘a man’s voice’. We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. ‘Men’s’ words. Women are silent.” So writes the Nobel prize- winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich in the introduction to her celebrated book The Unwomanly Face of War.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Ad Astra
his article was originally published on 30 August 2019, when Ad Astra premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Venice Film Festival has launched three of Hollywood’s most thoughtful space-travel movies recently, with last year’s First Man following Arrival and Gravity. This year, it’s the turn of Ad Astra, written and directed by James Gray, and starring Brad Pitt as Major Roy McBride, astronaut extraordinaire. Ad Astra is almost as intelligent as those other films, but it shares too much of their imagery to seem entirely original. And, like them, it veers towards questions of parenthood and loss, a trajectory that is starting to become irritating. Isn’t anyone allowed to journey to the final frontier without getting choked up about their relatives along the way?
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Why is Judy Garland the ultimate gay icon?
On 25 March, 1969, Judy Garland took to the stage at the Falkoner Center in Copenhagen. As she reached the crescendo of Over the Rainbow – the song which made her a global star aged just 17 – it was unknown to the audience that they were watching her final live performance. Four months later, 47 year-old Garland was found dead in Chelsea, London, after accidentally overdosing on the drugs she had self-medicated with since childhood. One of the headlines would read: “Judy’s voice stilled. The rainbow is gone.”
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks